Our intern took the news with dignity. She knew something was wrong as I spent the week in my office playing Minesweeper. Someone reset all the high scores and I had to get them back.

After I came back from putting the last of the intern’s boxes in her car, Cal said that the CFO of MarvcoTools called to inform us we would have to start interviewing candidates for the position of Radial Saw Engineer. Last week we received the TOPS radial wood/metal cutter with 180-degree swivel boom air-hydraulic cross feed, as a result of the buyout, and it’s a behemoth of a machine, something we haven’t dared to touch because the blades on that thing look like they could cut through bone no sweat.

So Cal and I, without an intern to fish out the crazies, conducted interviews to hire the person qualified to work this radial saw. Here now are select snippets from our interviews

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In the winter of 2010, I sold MARVCO to a company out of northern Illinois that manufactures radial arm saws for cutting wood and non-ferrous metals. Having owned and operated this corner of the internet for nearly seven years, I saw that it was time to explore more financially viable options.

The call came in on 13 January. “We’re interested in buying you out,” said the CFO of the MARVCO Tool Company, proud makers of the TOPS Industrial Duty Radial Arm Saw.

“I’m listening,” I said.

“Hows about [PRICE REDACTED] and a lifetime heavy discount on all of our tools?” said the CFO.

I lowered the amount of his initial offer considerably. “I’ll do you one better,” I said. “I’ll join your company as Creative Director. I get to keep my web site, you get all the rights and subsidiary rights to the MARVCO brand, and you pay me a monthly salary to write poetry exclusively about band saws and soldering tools.”

“Deal,” said the CFO.

Some would call me a sellout. I am one. I have always been one. Look for my latest book of poetry, Engineering, Design, and Fabrication of Automated Assembly And Processing Machinery For Various Segments Of Industry: New & Selected Verse, to be released in the early summer of 2010.

Thank you for all your support.

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Our intern brought her boyfriend into work. Dude had a telescopic nose, the kind of thin, straight nose you use to look down at people through. Like he spoke with it. His vocal cords were in that thing. When he found out I’m from Cape Cod, he said, “My family summers there,” and anyone nuts enough to use summer as a verb in front of me automatically makes my shitlist. But our intern’s a nice girl and we like her so Cal and I smiled through the encounter.

Before the boyfriend had a chance to open up a dialogue on salt-water taffy, I left the room to take a call from Ted Dusseldorph in my office.

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I got a phone call on the first day of 2010 from the Department of Commerce. I’ve been feeling lighter these days, as if I’ve left a metric fuckton of melodramatic baggage in 2009. Left it in that whole decade maybe. I wake up with the sun. I see who I am to the people in my life and I am OK with it. I no longer drink soda.

But the phone call: “Mr. Marvullo, this is Agent Sam Francis of the Census Bureau. I’m calling because you gave an invalid answer for Question 44 on your 2010 census.”

“Oh yeah. Name one good thing. That was a fun question.”

“Unfortunately we can’t do anything with the answer you provided. ‘The concept of healing.’”

“What are you talking about? That’s my one good thing.”

“We feed these census forms into a robot and the robot can only read certain answers. It’s not programmed for the remedial poetry of answers like the concept of healing.”

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Nothing gets my neurons popping quite like the banality of civics, my friends! I’ve just finished filling in the last bubble of my 2010 census! Because there are so few moments in the bureaucracy of American citizenry designed for you to actually feel counted, I confess that writing my ethnicity and place of birth in felt-tip pen on forms watermarked with the seal of the Dept. of Commerce is just the right amount of exciting, maybe even more so.

Why did I find myself just half a tic more excited this census round? After a decade of having my occupation listed as “writer/educator,” I’m starting the ’10s off as an “installation artist.” To new beginnings!

But then this: Among the regular census questions like place of residence, number of household dependants, net income, etc., there was one peculiar request that got me thinking. Question 44 was “Name one good thing.” It came after questions 42—”What’s your phone number?”—and 43—”Can we call it?”—and it allowed only one line for an answer. My one good thing is “the concept of healing.”

Last item on the agenda: I spent Boxing Day in my basement surrounded by boxes filled with the last decade’s documents. Valentines, birthday cards, aborted short stories, maps of cities—the middling refuse of ten years. Such profound poop. I found unsent love notes. I found poems. I found 2–3 years worth of journals and a quick glance through each of them turned up nothing. Which isn’t to say that I haven’t had a worthwhile thought from the ages of 12 to 22. I just didn’t write many of the good ones down. To wit, from an unsent love note dated 16 February 2003: “You challenge me.” Barf and a half, man!

When it gets to the point when we can leisurely travel through time—a feat that can’t be too far away since we’re pretty close to leisurely traveling through outer space—I believe that 90% of the trips will be backward so that we can find our younger selves and beat the shit out of us.

A couple of good thoughts stuck around long enough for me to remember them and bring them on down to paper so that I could articulate with as much honesty as possible. Best things I’ve written in the last ten years—GO.

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